Talk:The Art of War

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject China, a project to improve all China-related articles. If you would like to help improve this and other China-related articles, please join the project. All interested editors are welcome.

This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale. (see comments)

[edit] Yin-ch'ueh-shan source texts

Would it not be important to include information on the Yin-ch'ueh-shan discoveries in 1972? This included five additional chapters (dialogue), and a version of the 13 known chapters that was at least about 1000 years older than the one used up till then for translation (even up to Cleary in 1988). As far as I know it was only by R. T. Ames in 1993 that a 'new' English translation with this recently discovered source text was made. Ideally a "tree" of versions and relationships between the source texts (since 1972, at least two) could be made in this article. --Matrixtom (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 13:29, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Missing link

The Art of War (http://nanguo.chalmers.com.au/~robert/Publishing/China/suntzu/) translated by Thomas Cleary (1991)

-link does not work. Anyone know where the site has moved?

I wouldn't be surprised if it's hard to find it online again since his translation is still in print. --Mrwojo 17:54, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] New external link

The Denma translation

Is this some sort of book advertisement? If so, it shouldn't be here. --SunTzu2 09:42, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Duplicate of Sun Zi

This article is a duplicate of Sun Zi. This is what the Germans think w:de:Sun Zi and what I think as well after reading the book. This article should be merged into Sun Zi and redirected. --Francois Genolini 07:42, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hmm...Doesn't look like a duplicate to me... :-/ --SunTzu2 09:39, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Is this book meaningful? .....I don't exactaly think so. It is a bit old right?

lol he did not copy it from Sun Zi moron he made it himself he was genius wow I can't believe you didn't know that and yes it is meaning full to see the stratagem that they had back then moron —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.70.55.89 (talk) 00:41, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Please be civil. --Mrwojo 18:04, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Modern Military Applications

I heard that Art of War is still used in some military schools (including in the US, along with On War by Karl von Clausewitz). But I can't confirm this. Can anyone help? --SunTzu2 05:47, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Also this comment was just added: "In the United States Marine Corps, it is required reading for intelligence personnel and officially recommended for all Marines.". I'm not convinced. Does anyone have a source for this? --Lawrence Lavigne 00:53, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

The Navy War College uses the text "On War" by Von Clauswitz but, I don't think they use "The Art of War". FrankWilliams 19:09, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Here's a link to the USMC domain that lists the "Art of War" as part of the US Marines "Professional Reading Program". http://www.mcu.usmc.mil/ProDev/ProfReadingPgm.htm Seems like a pretty reputable source :)

On the back of the book I have it says the Art of War is a pocket favorite of the US army, in this article it tells you how it was used in modern sitations.

Added referenced note to section regarding US Army unit libraries containing "the Art of War" (without specific mention of "On War"). Still searching for annual book list (not unclassified?) authorized under Army Regulations 28-86, "US Army Contemporary Military Reading Program", but strongly suspect concordance with CSI/C&GSC recommendation on "The Art of War." Hotfeba 18:52, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Overview

Personally, I'd like to see some sort of overview of basic principles that mirrors the level of detail seen on The Prince. I'm confident that I could write such a summary, but what I'm wondering is if other people agree.

Also, I'm currently working on a Table of Contents for the book.

I totally agree with such a suggestion. This article definitely needs expansion. It is arguably one of the most influencial written texts in history. I also believe that there needs to be things written about how the Art of War can be applied in the business world as well. --Colipon+(T) 04:36, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Title

The article has the literal translation of the title as "Sun Tzu's Military Strategy". "Bing1" = soldier and "fa3" = laws/rules/guidelines, so would it be more accurate to read "bing1 fa3" as "soldier's rules/guide" or "rules for soldiering"? --siafu 23:39, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

兵法 (bing1 fa3) is a word in Chinese, although archaic. People today would use 战略 (zhan4 lue4). You may look it up in a Chinese word dictionary. Word by word, it would be similar to what you mentioned. --Voidvector 04:46, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism?

Can someone add a bit more criticism to this article? I remember complaints that the AoW is intentionally vague and open to interpretations, so the success of 'users' are more to do with their own skill, making the book's power something of a myth. --137.205.68.193 14:49, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The text isn't really vague, it's just not completely relevant to the modern military "paradigm". That is, it worked well in the Warring States period of China with armies meeting in formation in pitched battles, etc., but abstracting the text to provide insight into modern issues results in the introduction of "vagueness". --siafu 15:55, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Thesis/Synthesis/Antithesis

The section comparing the the Thesis /Synthesis /Antithesis concept with the excerpt from the AoW is not useful. Firstly, the comparison is not sound. Secondly, it implies a false precedence. It parrots common Chinese propaganda that attempts to link western socialist / communist writings with earler Chinese philosophies. Wiki standards? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 74.56.29.240 (talk) 17:03, August 23, 2007 (UTC)

I've removed this section. It sounded like someone's original research to me. --Mrwojo 18:01, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Uncertainties of Origin?

Should there be mention of the uncertainties of who wrote it and when it was written as mentioned in Sun Tzu? --Rissole 04:36, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Something on the attribution question would be great. I think I can find a source or two on that also, if you don't have one. siafu 04:55, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

I don't really have any expertise on The Art of War, I made the comment because after reading both articles I thought that they contradicted each other. So if you could write something it would be much better than me writing something :) Rissole 07:35, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

The Griffith translation goes into great detail on the uncertainty of the author and the time period of The Art of War (and concludes that the book was written during the Warring States period, much later than traditionally thought), and I would think it would be a great addition to the article. --70.49.90.175 21:58, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The Book of Five Rings

Although The Book of Five Rings (Musashi) was written much later (17th Century), this book is often placed in that same category as The Art of War (Sun Tsu). So perhaps it ought to be mentioned or at least added to "Related topics", to please the curious reader. PJ 10:02, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Outline

Maybe an outline of the main themes in the book could be useful.

[edit] bold

someone please unbold the opening paragraph. i dont know how. thanks

It's the zh-cpl template that for some reason is screwing up all the text following it. I stripped it for the time being, but after looking at the template page I don't know why it's doing that. Hopefully someone will fix it, though I have to admit it doesn't seem overwhelmingly useful. siafu 18:53, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] TV reference?

am I right when I say that The Art of War was referenced in the show Firefly? I don't remember too clearly... Robin Chen 02:18, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

No, in War Stories (Firefly episode), Niska quotes Shan Yu, a fictional character. I'm pretty familiar with both Art of War and Firefly, and that's as close as the two come. EVula 03:24, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] I'm kinda surprised.

That there isn't any criticism about the book's name, like how can you call war an "art". I guess it's not notable enough.--80.227.100.62 11:37, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

I've always thought what is remarkable about the book is how Sun Tzu turns war into an art form.

法 is usually translated as "method" or "law", but in the title of the book it's translated as "art". I think the Art of War sounds a lot better than Sun Tzu's Military Methods/Strategy, as on the front page. --64.231.220.4 19:19, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I think it means that hes defining it finely enough that it no longer becomes something reckless and savage, but more fine, like the way you'd call fine swordsmanship with fluidic movements an art, or archery an art.--Daniel Berwick 06:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

"The Art of War" is not a literal nor a figurative translation of the title in Chinese. As the above entry says, the word 法 translate to "method" or "law" which are horrible titles. The current translation almost give it a timeless mythical feeling to it. Yongke 07:19, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Ignorance of the meaning of the word "art" astounding. . .can't comprehend stupidity. . .mind. . .dying. . . —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.163.0.41 (talk) 16:05, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Follow-on sentence

From the article:

It was believed by some that the long-lost Sun Bin Bing Fa, or Sun Bin's The Art of War cited in the Book of Han, was actually Sun Tzu's The Art of War, but in April 1972, archaeologists discovered a tomb in Linyi County, Shandong Province, that contained several fragments of important scrolls buried during the Han Dynasty. Among the scrolls were a copy of the Sun Bin Bing Fa and a copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, thus removing any doubt.

Maybe I'm a little blonde today, but I'm discovering that these two follow-on sentences have made it increasingly unclear whether the two previously mentioned scrolls are from the same source. In the interests of increasing clarity and improving disambiguaties, could someone kindly state which of the two alternatives doesn't corresponds to the doubt which was removed? Thanks :)

see Yinqueshan Han Slips.--Skyfiler 22:05, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Page move

The article was moved by The Crying Orc this morning without discussion, with the rationale that Machiavelli shouldn't "play second fiddle" to Sun Tzu. However, I reverted this move since Machiavelli's Art of War is a rather little-known work by an otherwise famous other, and it has a much shorter article. The Bing Fa is by far the more recognized book by the name "Art of War" (lending its name to movies and albums, &c.). siafu 14:19, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

In certain circles, maybe. Others choose to discount Sun Tzu, and would not agree that Machiavelli's work is 'little known' (in their circles). However, it is not up to us to decide such matters. The point is that there is nothing wrong with having an 'art of war' disambiguation page, with the two books by that title (in English) each having their article's title qualified by the author's name. Anything else is systemic bias. The Crying Orc 16:58, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

We do have a The Art of War (disambiguation) page. We are also not concerned with "certain circles" but with the world in general; as The Art of War (Machiavelli) states in the very first sentence, it is "one of the lesser-read works" of Machiavelli. Most non-scholars do not even know it exists, and the work by Sun Tzu is vastly more well-known and referenced. This is born out by the simple Google test also-- "Art of War" Machiavelli yields 170,000 results. "Art of War" Sun Tzu yields 1,490,000. There is simply no contest, and in particular because Sun Tzu's book is so famous it serves us quite well to have it in the place of the just "Art of War" as most often that is what a user means when typing "Art of War" into the search box; doing so is not systemic bias. siafu 18:10, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Addendum: You may want to have a look at [1], or Wikipedia:Disambiguation under the "Page naming conventions" section and the "Primary topic" heading it states:

When there is a well known primary meaning for a term or phrase (indicated by a majority of links in existing articles and consensus of the editors of those articles that it will be significantly more commonly searched for and read than other meanings), then that topic may be used for the title of the main article, with a disambiguation link at the top. Where there is no such clearly dominant usage there is no primary topic page.

Just so we're clear about this decision vis a vis systemic bias: there is in this case very obviously a clearly dominant usage. siafu 18:14, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

One book was written in the 6th century BC, the other was written between 1519 and 1520. I really fail to see how picking Sun Tzu's text counts as bias, especially when coupled with siafu's above comments. EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:50, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

It's only appropriate to unilaterally move a page when the move is clearly non-controversial. If the move is controversial, it should be proposed at WP:RM.

WP:DAB#Primary_topic says:

When there is a well known primary meaning for a term or phrase (indicated by a majority of links in existing articles and consensus of the editors of those articles that it will be significantly more commonly searched for and read than other meanings), then that topic may be used for the title of the main article, with a disambiguation link at the top.

As mentioned above, one quick way to determine if that rule applies here is to compare relative notability with a google search:

"art of war" "sun tzu": 1,450,000 Google hits.

"art of war" "Machiavelli": 167,000 Google hits.

Another interesting test is to search amazon.com for "The Art of War" in the category "Books", ranked by "Relevance". The first three items, and most of the first 36, are various editions of Sun Tsu. The first listing for Machiavelli doesn't show up until item #37. -- Jim Douglas ^(talk) _(contribs) 22:06, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Phew, how many nails can we fit in this coffin? :-) EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:16, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Just one more: The page history is now trashed: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Art_of_War&action=history -- Jim Douglas ^(talk) _(contribs) 16:36, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Whoever moved it back here should have done so properly...the history is still here. My guess is that when moving it back, they just did a copy/paste instead of a proper page move. The Crying Orc 16:43, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. Man, we should get an admin to come in here and fix this... aww, crap. Be right back... EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:00, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay, the false AoW article was deleted and The Art of War (Sun Tzu) moved to The Art of War, restoring the page history. This talk page, however, got equally screwed over; however, its seen a lot more action than the main article. Should I do the same thing? I can restore all of our comments easily enough, but a bit of history will be lost. Not sure which is most important... EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:08, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Sure, if you can sort it out, go for it! -- Jim Douglas ^(talk) _(contribs) 17:12, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Removed External Links

Hello, I am new to Wikipedia, recently I came to this page and saw a link that I like, but it seem to be removed now. Can anyone tell me how to retrieve it? I only remember that the URL contain a 'chinese' inside. Can anyone show me how to look for it? Thanks

[edit] Fullmetal Allusion

Under Television it should be added that Episode 13 of Fullmetal Alchemist: Fullmetal Vs. Flame, Mustang quotes the Art of War a few times.

http://www.tv.com/fullmetal-alchemist/fullmetal-vs.-flame/episode/395450/summary.html

This website may not be very reliable, but anybody who has watched the episode should be able to tell where those quotes come from.

Jaimeastorga2000 16:24, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ghost Dog reference

I added some clarification here... while Whitaker's character does reference The Art of War multiple times within the film, his primary inspiration is the Hagakure. MrWarMage 04:26, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Applications Outside the Military

This is my first post. The following are non-military (i.e. law-related) references I found in researching an article I recently wrote called “The Trial Warrior: Applying Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to Trial Advocacy”:

Ashley, Fred T., “The Art of War, Litigation and Mediation”, Ashley Mediation Centers (available online at: (http://www.socalmediator.com/theartofwar.htm);

Balch, Christopher D., “The Art of War and the Art of Trial Advocacy: Is There Common Ground?” (1991), 42 Mercer L. Rev. 861-873;

Barnhizer, David. THE WARRIOR LAWYER : POWERFUL STRATEGIES FOR WINNING LEGAL BATTLES (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Bridge Street Books, 1997);

Beirne, Martin D. and Scott D. Marrs, “The Art of War and Public Relations: Strategies for Successful Litigation” (available online at: http://library.findlaw.com/2005/Dec/28/231115.html);

Gordon, Gary, J., “Slaying the Dragon: The Cross Examination of Expert Witnesses”, Rider Bennett LLP website (available online: http://75.100.99.194/news_pubs/article_detail.cfm?ARTICLE_ID=3894&ARTICLE_TYPE_ID=2);

Harris, Paul. WARRIOR LAWYER (San Francisco, CA: Paul Harris (self-publication, 1991);

St. Marie, Ronald M., “The Art of Litigation: Deception and Settlement- The Application of Sun Tzu's Ancient Strategies of War to the Law” Chan Law Group, 2002 (available online at: http://chanlaw.com/litigation.htm).

Solomon, Samuel H., “The Art of War: Pursuing Electronic Evidence as Your Corporate Opportunity” Doar Litigation Consulting website article (available online at: http://www.doar.com/apps/uploads/literature13_art_of_war.pdf ).

Wallo, William E., “Rambo in the Courtroom: Sometimes it Pays to be Confrontational” (available online at: http://www.walloworld.com/pdf/rambo_courtroom.pdf ).

Hope this helps,

Apribetic 16:41, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

I've made the above-referenced reference edits onto the main page.

Apribetic 13:16, 29 May 2007 (UTC) 14:26, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Improving this Article on The Art of War

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Gary Gagliardi. I am generally recognized as the world's leading authority on Sun Tzu's The Art of War, at least by the media, where I appear regularly, the various groups that give book awards, who give me awards regularly, and among organizations that want training in Sun Tzu's methods, which include the largest organizations in the world. I have written over fifteen books on the topic. Ten of them have won book awards in the last four years. My books on Sun Tzu have been translated all over the world. My works are used for teaching strategy and Chinese culture by universities and other training organizations worldwide. You can find out more about me by simply searching on my name. I am in regular communication with most people doing research or papers on Sun Tzu around the world, including many in China and Taiwan, as well as those doing serious work on strategy around the world.

Wikipedia's articles on The Art of War and, to a lesser degree, Sun Tzu, like most of popular understanding of such topics, get more wrong than it does right. I could correct this material, but I hesitant to do so because writing on Wiki is a little bit like writing on water: anyone can undo any amount of serious work in a moment. In a discussion with the Wiki editor, SiobhanHansa, I have encouraged me not to turn my back on the Wiki approach and instead to start a discussion about the changes that I would like to make. I will not make any changes at all before discussing them here.

Of course, anyone can accuse me of having commercial interests in the topic because, like any serious and successful expert, I do have such an interests. All my books are products. I get paid for offering training on Sun Tzu, even when teaching courses at universities, which I do when I have the time. At least one of my university classes is on video and offered as a commercial product, which I have a financial interest in. The vast majority of the people in the world who are offering training in Sun Tzu's Art of War strategy are using course materials that I played a least a part in developing. Anything that touches the popularity of Sun Tzu affects me financially in some way. However, I will not link to any of my product or training sites at Wiki. I won't even link to my personal site or the main site of the Science of Strategy Institute, neither of which offer products for sale directly though other Wiki editors can link if they choose.

As far as my concerns about the topic of "war," I personally wish that no one had every put the word "War" in the English title of the Bing-fa. Sun Tzu wrote his book as a scientific work. A great deal of it is dedicated to the precise definition of terms. In the original Chinese, it reads much like Euclid's Geometry in the ancient Greek (another one of my hobbies and the subject of another website I won't mention). Sun Tzu defines "bing" in his first stanza as "the skill of survival," like our modern idea of "survival of the fittest." He defines "fa" in his seventh stanza as "methods that serve a goal." While no one would be against learning survival skills or methods to reach goals, there is a whole crowd of people who have a an emotional reaction to the word "war" that make Sun Tzu's ideas sometimes difficult to communicate because people assume it must be evil because it explains how to win "war."

My biggest problem with the current Wiki article is that much of it and the resulting discussion are based on poor translation. Virtually all English translations are taken almost mindlessly from "modern" Chinese dictionaries The result is often laughable. Even the Chinese have to translate Sun Tzu's ancient Chinese, even though they still use the same characters (or more precisely, the decendents of those characters since Sun Tzu wrote before the current "brush" based characters, when Chinese was written in using a stylus on bamboo.)

This mistranslation leads to some absurd statements in various translations. For example, a character that currently means "persistent" originally meant "long time." You can easily understand the historical relationship. However, one popular English translation renders a line of Sun Tzu to read "No success in battle comes from being persistent." Which seems just plain stupid even to those not training in strategy, but, of course, the original sense of "No successful battle lasts a long-time," is easy to understand, especially in since one of Sun Tzu's main points is that conflict is expensive and that success is not just to winning but to make victory pay, which means eliminating conflict, or what I call "winning without conflict." There are many very common problems in translating

As an example of poor translation, the chapter titles reference Chow-Hou Wee's translation. I have never heard of Chow-Hou Wee, but I can tell you that his chapter English titles have nothing to do with what Sun Tzu's actually wrote. Though the Chinese in these titles is correct, the "translation" doesn't translate those characters except through the filter of what Chow-Hee thinks the chapter is about. Once again, Sun Tzu defines the terms he uses, especially those he uses as chapter titles. However, a listing of chapter titles is not as useful as a brief explanation of what the chapters cover and why. Sun Tzu developed his book in a very systematic way: starting with basic concepts and building on them through the course of the work. Each chapter has a purpose: chapter one defines the key factors affecting decision-making, chapter two covers the economics of competition, and so on. It is also useful to know that the book is written in a circle, so that the last chapter on information sources leads back to the first chapter on situation analysis.

The section of this article on "Thesis-AntiThesis-Synthesis" is some of the purest drivel I have every seen associated with Sun Tzu. It has no foundation in the history of Chinese philosophy or in the study or appliction of Sun Tzu. There have been lots of commentators on Sun Tzu down through the centuries and most of them are pretty dense. One of the problems with Sun Tzu is the way commentary gets mixed in with his work. Sun Tzu had some very Darwinian ideas but Hegel and Sun Tzu are a million miles apart in approach.

One of my main criticisms of most English translations of Sun Tzu is that they mix commentary with translation, often with the commentary replacing the Sun Tzu. For example, Griffith didn't like a lot of Sun Tzu's ideas so he would translated one line, say, "Always leave an escape route for your opponent." Then he would add his own commentary to undermine Sun Tzu, which as I recall in this case was something like, "This isn't so the enemy can get away, but so that you can chase him down from the rear and destroy him," which is a complete invention on Griffith's part. One of the reasons I did my translation side-by-side with a transliteration, was so that people could compare the original text with any given translation (not only my own) so that they could see what the "translators" were just making up as an explantion of Sun Tzu. All this stuff about what Tu Mu said or what Hsiang said just confuses what Sun Tzu said and the Hegelian twist on it is nonsense times two.

However, a discussion of the ancient Chinese philosophy of science would be very helpful in understanding The Art of War. Sun Tzu patterned his five key factors (introduced in the beginning of chapter one) after the five elements of classical Chinese science and philosophy. (Much as the five Greek elements influenced Western science for generations.) He also used the graphical/geographical diagramming method from the I Ching now known as the ba gua ("eight directions" after the eight cardinal points on the compass) as one of his organizing principles. A great deal of Chinese culture and medicine are built around the many associations of the ba gua and the five elements. I did a whole book (The Art of War plus Its Amazing Secrets) around the ancient diagramming methods and cultural symbolism of the Bing-fa that is lost on modern readers. (And unfortunately, on many from mainland China, where a lot of this was culture suppressed in the twentieth century, but preserved among the Chinese outside of PRC.) I can add such a discussion if people would like to see it.

Sun Tzu's ideas are easier to understand when explained in in terms of Asian culture. Much of his system involves what we call in our training "complementary opposites," that is the balance of opposing forces that require each other to exist. In the West, we call this idea "yin and yang" but in Sun Tzu's work, every system exists as a balance of forces: climate and ground create the environment, command and methods create an organization, obvious action and surprise create momentum and so on. For Sun Tzu, understanding competitive systems means working with these opposing forces. These forces are polarities: pure opposites in their very nature, though they create each other in a cycle, and exist only in a harmonious whole.

This can get confusing though because Sun Tzu also teaches a very important and seemingly similar concept, but one that is really very different called "emptiness and fullness." Emptiness and fullness is the descriptions of comparative extremes that exist along a continuum of conditions (as opposed to pure polarities). For Sun Tzu, all relative conditions (large/small, fast/slow, near/far, weak/strong, unobstructed/barricaded, etc.) can be simplified into the idea of emptiness/fullness. These extremes aren't "forces" but a comparison of the quality of things. The title of his Chapter Six (rendered in Wiki as "weakness and strength") is actually the Chinese characters for emptiness (poverty, need, etc.) and fullness (abundance, wealth, etc.) that Sun Tzu defines extremely clearly. In Sun Tzu's analysis, extreme conditions along the one continuum engender their opposite extreme in OTHER conditions along OTHER continuums. So large forces are slow; empty land creates speed, and so on.

The section here, "Application Outside the Military" section is especially weak considering the large amount of work being done in this area. It is more about name-dropping and popular culture than about people actually using Sun Tzu's methods. The truth is that most of the practical application of Sun Tzu are being used in the business world in business courses at universities and industry seminars. People might also find the historical relationship between the Asian martial arts and the Bing-fa interesting. The interest of some cricket player or even political advisor in The Art of War says virtually nothing about the practical application of Sun Tzu's methods. I personally have worked for both political parties and can tell you that in the real world, real political contests have been decided more often by politicians ignoring Sun Tzu's advice than using it. (True life: A group of Democrats tried to get John Kerry to use a Sun Tzu's approach in positioning on the War in Iraq, but Kerry and his key advisors didn't understand it and refused. Could he have won using it? We will never know.)

If readers would like me to add any of this information or work on the existing article, I will do so, but only with your support. My interest is not to debate these issues but to expose as many people as are interested to the vast amount of information available about them. Garygagliardi 20:16, 6 September 2007 (UTC)garygagliardi

HI Gary, I agree with your criticize of this article, it needs a lot of clean up, detail, and much more information can be presented. I would be interested to know your opinion of Lionel Giles' 1910 translation, as that is the copy (and information about) the Art of War I am most familiar with. In that translation his noted and preface/introduction provide a large amount of information on the background and context of the work, as well as talking about the commentary and larger impact of the work on chinese literature. I would prefer to use this edition as a framework for rebuilding the article - as it is the standard reference text. Your thoughts? DarkCryst 21:33, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Gary, thanks for taking an interest in this article. I think your suggestions for improving this article are well reasoned. Let me offer a suggestion, however. You are evidently a learned scholar on Art of War, but seemingly relatively new to Wikipedia. One principal tenet of Wikipedia's editing process is that reasoned argument, which constitutes most of your post, trumps arguments from authority, which is restricted to the just one paragraph of your post. Unfortunately, it's the first paragraph, and that paragraph might give the impression—however unjustified—that you are trying to push your argument through by sheer force of credentials, and cause some folks to disregard the rest. That seems a shame. Just a thought. BrianTung 17:00, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I expected a "too long, didn't read" comment right about here. :P

Great post, nothing to add. Now hope someone actually changes this article. Qevlarr (talk) 23:01, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Portugal did not technically 'beat' England in Euro 2006, they drew, then won on penalties, its unlikely you'd be able to use the art of war to plan a shoot out win. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.152.252.218 (talk) 21:08, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

The Art of War can be applied to all aspects of life. Caddcreativity 19:00, 08 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What is the language of the original text?

Since there are many "Chinese languages" (and dialects), what precisely is the language utilized in the original?

I'm aware that languages are always changing, and this is especially noticeble after centuries have gone by, but even so there must be a way to express in greater detail what the language of the original text is -- other than simply saying that it was written in "Chinese".

Can somebody help?

Bepp (talk) 19:06, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 13 Chapters section

In 'The 13 chapters' section, the descriptions of each chapter use chapter titles that do not match any of the 3 listed sets of titles. Does anyone have any thoughts on which to use? I by no means am a Art of War scholar (I came to this article to find out more about it actually), but this jumped out at me. PabloSus86 05:43, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Full text

The full text of The Art of War does not belong in the article. I believe that policy is clear on this, particularly WP:NOT#PLOT. I removed it once, and was reverted, but without any comment. I am removing the text again, but if anyone has a good reason for it being here, please tell me. 99.248.214.86 (talk) 04:51, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Quotations section

...is verging on almost gibberish. Personal opinion and commentary throughout; it's not even well formatted. If no one feels like cleaning it up, I'll remove that section or at least hack it down to a couple of actual quotations. Matt Deres (talk) 19:50, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Hidden categories: B-Class Chinese military history articles | Chinese military history task force articles